Engineer vs. Hacker Quandary

Most hackers could eventually become engineers if they chose to do so, but the reverse - training engineers to become hackers - is next to impossible. Is this true?

Meanwhile, Peter Christensen, in his own blogpost, defined the two as follows:

Hacker: Always trying new things, trying to stretch the limits of what's possible or what exists… Linus Torvalds is a great example of a hacker - he had two giant ideas that few thought were possible - writing a free operating system and doing it with a worldwide collection of volunteers. Once something is functional and successful, the hacker moves on to another hard problem, like a serial entrepreneur.

Engineer: All of the definitions of engineering that I've found were too complicated and missed the point, so I propose this: An engineer is someone who takes something that is known to be possible, and makes it fit within a given, limiting set of criteria. Some common criteria are:

Note that this doesn't mean that an engineer is any less creative than a hacker. On the contrary, the constraints provided by the engineering problem can provoke more creative and original thinking than that of the original invention.

Engineers can become hackers
On the other hand, Kim Guldberg answered, "What is the difference between an engineer and a hacker?" in quora as follows:

For journalists and the general public a hacker is someone who breaks into computer systems stealing information and doing other malicious stuff.

For hackers the term seems to have expanded… Today being a hacker is more a question of mind set than just skill set. It's a curious individual, who has obvious talents and knowledge. He (and today sometimes also she) is somewhat geeky and obsessive in his interests, he is persistent and able to think out of the box. He is not bound by conventions and what is understood as possible or the right way of doing things and he has an open mind.

So the answer to your question must be. If an engineer has the above-mentioned mind set, he can be a hacker if he wishes and work hard at it.

With that beginning, tell us your definitions of hackers and engineers, and explain (if you can) how engineers can become hackers.

First, my pet peeve; re: "a hacker is someone who breaks into computer systems stealing information and doing other malicious stuff." That defines a criminal. A hacker may or may not be a criminal, as a doctor, lawyer or anyone may or may not be a criminal, but that definition is of a criminal.

Now to the questions at hand: "can engineers become hackers and hackers become engineers?"

I believe they can. In my mind, the mindset, thought processes and level of creativity are similar. Engineering, however, is supposed to follow a disciplined and calculated process, while hacking tend to take a more "I'm pretty sure" approach.

Most engineers I've met can skip the process and work on intuition if need be. I suspect it's a little more difficult for a hacker to move to engineering simply because It's almost always more difficult to transition from low discipline to high discipline.

In other words, I think the hacker mindset is already in most engineers. It just needs to be let loose. Corporate structure is more likely to be an inhibitor than is the engineering mindset.

For a long time, there have been engineering disciplines that requierd thinking like an attacker. Consider the fields of cryptography, signal jamming and anti-jamming systems and the general subject of electronic countermeasures.

Exactly. When the whole world of embedded systems becomes more vulnerable to potentials of external attacks (as more and more systems are designed to get connected to the internet), isn't it about time to have a special cource at an engineering school -- focused on "jpw to think like an attacker"?

If we can teach engineering, we should also be able to teach the art of hacking...

Anyone rememeber Larry Lange? He was the first EE Times reporter to focus on covering Internet stuff. He interviewed Marc Andreessen in our offices before anyone understood what Netscape was doing.

Larry used to love the Black Hat event. He pointed out there are white and black hat hackers working for good and evil purposes.

Since then it has become clear to me there are grey areas too.

Add this to the mix: Hackathons are events where engineers design stuff. In this context hacking means quickly creating prototypes to test ideas out, bypassing what can be a slow design process at large established companies.

I covered two hackathons. One at Y Combinbator:

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1263094

And one at Facebook's Open Compute Project event:

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1262990

I think we ought to host a couple hackathons at Design West 2014. Anyone else interested?

IMHO there is little that's differentiating hackers, crackers and engineers: the supposition of maliciousness does not necessarily apply only to one of the categories. (There's also the term of the "malicious engineer".)

On the other hand, one thing is common to all of them: to be superior, you have to apply analysis, a systematical approach, sometimes patience. Besides the 'brute force attack' all these methods describe engineers as well as the 'hackers'.

To be honest, from time to time I HAVE to hack something: to access information necessary but denied to me by to lack of documentation, cooperation, incompentence or sheer ignorance.

My one comment is that in the course of my studies I had to take class entitled "engineering ethics". I do not think hackers have taken this class. Having said that - yes you need to know your enemies better than you know your friends. In some sense ethics is a cultural issue and can be interpreted based on the culture you come from. Not making any judgements here - just an observation.

This is one of the most interesting article I have come across in EEtimes recently. thanks for posting it Junko.

I think Engg and hackers are same species with same mindset just different vision. I have seen engineer act like hackers. In one of a startup I do see when engineers were competing for resources and sys admin was weak they started to hack system to get thier job ahead in competition. I see tasks are like glass half full. Engg focus on half full part and hackers focus on half empty part. Engg try to get more water to fill it and hackers focus only on empty side of glass. I think they can be interchanged. The only thing is engg tend to worry about legal Vs illegal aspect where hacker tend to ignore that part, infact they love being in illegal zone. If we make everything legal then every engg can act like hacker, given bth are asked to do same task.

There are so many different definitions of "hacker" that IMO it's important to indicate which one you're using. There are seven definitions at Wiktionary, four of them technological. Wikipedia has three definitions, which I'll repeat here:

The first definition includes both "white hat" hackers like Robert Redford in Sneakers (1992) and "black hat" hackers AKA "crackers". There's also the pejorative "hacker", meaning someone do does things haphazardly, like a "hack writer", or a programmer who hacks away at code until it works with a few test cases instead of doing a careful design.

So call me a "hacker" if you like, but please don't ever call me a "hacker" :-)

Good questions, Junko, and I think Susan is right that there are many shades of meaning to the word (like the difference between analysis and blog in journalism). But most of the hackers I know studied electrical engineering in school, work as engineers, and call themselves hackers. If we're talking about cyber criminals or other malicious people, let's call them what they are. And if a self-educated hacker gains enough knowledge to do some interesting things in code, is that not -- at some level -- engineering?

Do you have to have a degree in engineering to be an "engineer?" And must you lack such a degree to be a "hacker?" What do others think about that...?